The 1st of September 1939. Nazi Germany invades Poland, and the German Army is followed by the
Einsatzgruppen which are Nazi mobile death squads sent to Poland to kill the civilians,
mostly the Polish intelligentsia such as teachers, priests, physicians,
and other prominent members of Polish society. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union
in June 1941, these paramilitary death squads working with units of the German armed forces and
local collaborators, will conduct mass shooting operations targeting mostly Jews, Romani, Soviet
officials, and other people with disabilities. From 1941 to 1945, while operating behind the
front line in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, the Einsatzgruppen will murder around 2 million
innocent men, women and children accounting for one third of all Jewish Holocaust victims.
One of the main perpetrators of these atrocities is Otto Rasch.
Otto Rasch was born on the 7th of December 1891 in Friedrichsruh then part of the German Empire.
The First World War began on the 28th of July 1914 and Rasch enlisted in the
Imperial German Navy as a lieutenant. The War ended on the 11th of November
1918 when the German leaders signed the armistice in the Compiègne Forest in France.
Following Germany's defeat, Rasch studied philosophy,
law and political science, and received doctorates in law and political economy.
With two university doctorates, he was known as "Dr Dr Rasch".
In 1931, Otto Rasch became a private sector lawyer
in Dresden and worked as a legal advisor for several companies.
On the 1st of October 1931 he joined the Nazi Party and in March 1933 he joined the SS.
In 1933, after Hitler and the Nazi Party came into power, Rasch was successively appointed mayor of a
small town of Radeberg, followed shortly in 1935 by becoming lord mayor of Wittenberg.
However, his time as Lord Mayor of Wittenberg was not extended because questionable costs
arose in the construction of his official villa. This is probably the reason why Rasch
did not continue his career in local politics and started a career in the ranks of the Nazi
security service. Beginning in 1936, Rasch was employed full-time by the SD which was
the intelligence agency of the Nazi Party and was considered a sister organization with the
Gestapo which was the official secret police of Nazi Germany. Over the course of the Nazi era,
the SD took on an increasingly prominent role in Nazi anti-Jewish policies.
On the 1st of October 1937 Rasch assumed leadership of the State
Police – STAPO - in Frankfurt am Main and in March 1938,
after Adolf Hitler annexed the Federal State of Austria into the German Reich,
Rasch became director of security for Upper Austria which was based in Linz.
On the 15th of March 1939, less than 6 months after the annexation of the Sudetenland, Nazi
Germany invaded and occupied the remaining parts of Czechoslovakia establishing the Protectorate
of Bohemia and Moravia. Konstantin von Neurath became the Reich Protector and
Otto Rasch was appointed chief of the Security Police and SD in Prague.
The Second World War began on the 1st of September, 1939 when Nazi Germany invaded Poland.
On the 27th the same month, Heinrich Himmler established a new agency - Reich Security Main
Office - which formalized the relationship between the intelligence service – the SD - and the
Security Police, which consisted of the Gestapo and the KRIPO, which was a Criminal Police.
This new agency, led by Himmler’s deputy, Reinhard Heydrich, was an ideologically radical and brutal
institution responsible for coordinating and perpetrating many aspects of the Holocaust.
During the German invasion of Poland,
Otto Rasch suggested and oversaw the liquidation of the civilians, mostly the Polish intelligentsia
such as teachers, priests, physicians, and other prominent members of Polish society.
Rasch himself checked which prisoners were to be killed. With the approval of Reinhard Heydrich,
he personally selected the places of secret executions and later he organized and founded
the Soldau concentration and transit camp, which, according to a later statement by Rasch,
was established specifically for the purpose of secretly executing the members of the
Polish intelligentsia. Out of a total of 30,000 prisoners, between 10,000–13,000 died there.
On Sunday, the 22nd of June 1941 started Operation Barbarossa,
the German invasion of the Soviet Union. The 3,000 personnel of four Einsatzgruppen
were sent to the Eastern Front and Reinhard Heydrich appointed
Rasch the commander of the Einsatzgruppe C. Heydrich appreciated men like Otto Rasch,
who were educated and had a strong ideological commitment to National
Socialism and many Einsatzgruppe leaders such as Otto Ohlendorf were highly educated men.
Rasch’s Einsatzgruppe C was attached to Army Group South at Kiev. Their
objective was to kill the Jews and Gypsies, as well as the Soviet political commissars.
In late summer 1941 Himmler assembled the leaders of the men of the Einsatzkommandos
and repeated to them the order to kill all the reported Jews and Romani as well as the
Soviet political commissars and pointed out that neither the leaders nor the men
who were taking part in the liquidation bore any personal responsibility for the execution
of this order. The responsibility was his and the Führer's alone.
Women and children were to be shot as well in order not to have any avengers remain.
On the 19th of September 1941, German forces entered the city of Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine.
Along with a large part of German-occupied Ukraine,
the city was incorporated into the Reichskommissariat Ukraine
which had been established on the 1st of September with Erich Koch as administrator.
Before the German invasion, some 160,000 Jews resided in Kyiv which was approximately
20 percent of the total population of the capital. Following the start of Operation
Barbarossa in June 1941, approximately 100,000 Jews fled the city or were already
serving in the Soviet military. By the time the Germans occupied Kyiv, there were about
60,000 Jews remaining in the city. Most of those who remained were mostly women, children,
the elderly, those who were ill or those had been unable or unwilling to flee earlier.
During the first week of the German occupation of Kyiv, there were two major explosions. These
explosions not only destroyed the German headquarters and areas around the main
street of the city center but also killed a large number of German soldiers and officials. Though
the explosions were caused by mines left by retreating Soviet soldiers and officials,
the Germans used the sabotage as a pretext to murder those Jews who still remained in Kyiv.
On the 29th and 30th of September 1941, SS and German police units and their auxiliaries,
under the guidance of the members of Einsatzgruppe C, murdered a significant
number of the Jewish population who remained in Kyiv. This massacre which belongs to one
of many mass shootings perpetrated by the Nazi Germans beginning in 1941, occurred
at a ravine called Babi Yar or Babyn Yar which at the time, was located just outside the city.
On September the 28th, the Jews were ordered to assemble the next morning for resettlement.
Although only a participation of approximately 5-6,000 Jews had been expected at first, more than
30,000 Jews arrived who, until the very moment of their execution,
still believed that they would be resettled, thanks to an extremely clever organization.
They were marched to the ravine, and as they reached the site, were forced to surrender any
valuables. They were then made to take off their clothes and move towards the edge of
the ravine in groups of ten. As they reached the edge, they were shot by Sonderkommando 4a,
which was a special detachment from Einsatzgruppe C under the commanding officer Paul Blobel.
German and Ukrainian police participated in the killing as well. At the end of the day,
the bodies were covered with a thin layer of dirt. According to reports sent to the
Einsatzgruppen headquarters in Berlin, 33,771 Jews were massacred during this two-day period
and it was one of the largest mass killings at a single location during World War II.
At least 29 survivors are known. One of them is Dina Pronicheva, who was one of
those ordered to march to the ravine, to be forced to undress and then to be shot.
In one of her written postwar testimonies Pronicheva described what she saw at
Babi Yar: “Each time I saw a new group of men and women, elderly people, and children being forced
to take off their clothes, all of them were being taken to an open pit where submachine-gunners shot
them. Then another group was brought…. With my own eyes I saw this horror. Although I was
not standing close to the pit, terrible cries of panic-stricken people and quiet children’s
voices calling “Mother, mother…” reached me”. Jumping before being shot and falling on
other bodies, Pronicheva survived playing dead in a pile of corpses.
Otto Rasch distinguished himself with particular ruthlessness during this
massacre and on his order, all Einsatzgruppen personnel, including the commanding officers,
personally shot Jews, so that all the members were culpable.
By October 1941, when Rasch was discharged from his position, his Einsatzgruppe C
reported approximately 80,000 "specially treated", meaning those who had been murdered.
However, killings at Babi Yar continued. Over the next few months, thousands more
were murdered there, including Jews, Gypsies, and Soviet prisoners of war. Those who attempted
to hide were turned over to the Germans by the Ukrainians. In all, some 100,000
people, Jews and non-Jews, were killed at Babi Yar. In July 1943 the Germans returned
to destroy the evidence of mass murder as part of “Special Action 1005” which was a top-secret Nazi
operation conducted from June 1942 to late 1944 to hide or destroy any evidence of the mass murder.
With the Red Army approaching Kyiv, Germans embarked on a cover-up operation to conceal
what had been happening in Babi Yar. Paul Blobel, who had been in control of the mass murders in
Babi Yar two years earlier, supervised the action. For this operation, the Germans used prisoners who
were being held at the Syrets concentration camp located close to the Babi Yar ravine. The Syrets
camp, established by the Germans in May 1942, served to intern Soviet prisoners of war,
partisans, and Jews who had survived the mass actions of late September 1941.
To cover up the mass shootings at Babi Yar, the Germans ordered 321 prisoners
from Syrets to dig up the mass graves and burn the remains of victims. The bodies were exhumed,
burned and the ashes scattered over farmland in the vicinity. Eighteen inmates who escaped
into hiding testified about these crimes to the Soviet authorities in November 1943.
Between 1942 and 1945, Otto Rasch served as the director of Continental Oil,
Inc. in Berlin. The company had exclusive rights to trade oil products and to acquire
oil assets in German-occupied territories. In addition to the occupied territories,
it operated its subsidiaries also in Germany. The company had a number of private shareholders
but a leading role in the consortium was held by Deutsche Bank and IG Farben
company which is perhaps best known for its role in producing the poison gas Zyklon B.
that killed over one million people in gas chambers during the Holocaust.
After the end of the war, Otto Rasch was then finally to face justice and pay for his crimes.
During the Einsatzgruppen trial which started on the 29th of September 1947,
Otto Rasch was one of the main defendants.
However, while 24 defendants had been indicted, only 22 were tried. Emil Hausmann,
who belonged to Einsatzgruppe D had committed suicide in July 1947, and
Otto Rasch was deemed too ill to stand trial.
However, on the 12th of January 1948 Rasch gave
testimony in a smaller courtroom in the Nuremberg’s Palace of Justice.
The case against him was discontinued on the 5th of February 1948 due to his
mental and physical instability as he had Parkinson's disease and associated dementia.
At the Einsatzgruppen trial, which lasted until the 10th of April 1948 , 14 of Rasch’s fellow
Nazi colleagues, convicted of war crimes, crimes against humanity and membership in
criminal organizations, were sentenced to death by hanging. Only 4 death sentences
were carried out. Today, we can only wonder if Rasch would have been executed along with them.
Otto Rasch was 56 years old when he died on the 1st of November 1948.
There were no tears shed for Otto Rasch.
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